Birthing Spirit

Ever since the SBS Insight program on Birth Options I have been nurturing a crush on Clare Bowditch which is now a major love affair (one way, obviously ). Her Open Letter on the current Australian Homebirth Crisis is just brilliant. Here is a taste below, but do go and check out the whole thing…

The Australian Government’s attempt to ban homebirth – are you serious?

You know how, when you’re doing something very intimate and beautiful, you usually prefer not to do it in a very bright room with a drip in your arm, and a massive belt around your waist attached to a machine that goes BEEP BEEEP, with lots of strangers waltzing in and out of the door, turning up the houselights, using instruments to prod and measure your private parts, and asking you if you would mind if their students came in to watch?

Well, not surprisingly, same rule applies for most women when they’re giving birth.

Fact; some women just do not want to give birth in a hospital. Call me “craxy!!!’, but fair enough. Birth for them is too special, too intimate, and too precious a thing to occur in a hospital. If your child is sick or your pregnancy is high risk (as in the case of twins), a hospital is the probably right place to be. Normal pregnancy and birth, however, are not illnesses, and Australian women deserve the right to choose for themselves whether they give birth in hospital or at home.

Today, Minister Nicola Roxon proposed a bill that removes this right from Australian women, by excluding homebirth from insurance schemes for midwives. More on this later. The point is, this is beyond belief and deserves a strong rising up from those of us who care about protecting who who are at their most vulnerable.